06. 10. 2023 Lorenzo Candeago Development, DevOps

How to Test Beta Repos for RedHat 8.9 in a Container

We wanted to test the new RedHat 8.9 beta releases, but RedHat doesn’t currently provide a beta container. How can we do it anyway?

Please note that this procedure is not officially supported by RedHat.

As a first step, we want to retrieve the package redhat-release from the rhel 8.9 beta ISO, in the directory BaseOS/Packages/ where the ISO’s packages are located:

ls /iso_mount/BaseOS/Packages/redhat-release-* 
/iso_mount/BaseOS/Packages/redhat-release-8.9-0.0.el8.x86_64.rpm 
/iso_mount/BaseOS/Packages/redhat-release-eula-8.9-0.0.el8.x86_64.rpm

Now we can start a NetEye container to use for development (based on ubi8) with the packages we copied from the rhel 8.9 beta ISO:

docker run -it -v ~/iso_mount/BaseOS/Packages/:/root/BaseOs/ --rm docker-si.wuerth-phoenix.com/neteye:4.32-build bash

Next, install the following package that will ship the beta repo definitions:

dnf install ~/BaseOS/redhat-release*.rpm

Then after the installation we can register the system again:

subscription-manager register --org "xxx" --activationkey "xxx" --name "test_89" --force

And now we can see that we have the beta repos installed!

dnf repolist 
Updating Subscription Management repositories. 
repo id repo name
 [...] 
rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-beta-rpms Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - AppStream Beta (RPMs) 
rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-beta-rpms Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - BaseOS Beta (RPMs) 
[...]

To use the beta repo, we just need to disable the stable repos, and now we can use the beta image.

dnf config-manager --disable rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms
dnf config-manager --disable rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms

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